Welcome to Home of Donabe Cooking! This blog is about healthy Japanese and donabe (Japanese clay pot) cooking. I love my donabe life and I want to share the joy of donabe cooking with many other people. I also write about random food, wine, and travel experiences.
Los Angeles | Tokyo

Monday, November 28, 2011

Every time I make a roasted duck, Jason begs me to make duck stock with the remaining carcasses and make duck broth ramen. So I did again...with another twist this time!

First, with the entire remaining carcasses from previous night's roasted duck, I combined it with some green onion (green part only), a couple of garlic cloves, some sliced ginger, some black peppercorns, 3L liquid (water + 1C sake). The stock was low-simmered for 8 hours until the liquid was reduced down to less than 1L and it was strained. The aroma was superb.

As a secret ingredient for this ramen dish, I made smoked soy sauce with my donabe smoker, "Ibushi Gin". With this donabe smoker, you can make such easy smoking at home. Cleaning is very easy, too. After smoking donabe, I just needed to remove the foil in the bottom with already charred smoke chips after use. Donabe-smoked soy sauce is so aromatic and just wonderful. I love it with so many different dishes including sashimi! You can find my super-easy donabe smoked soy sauce recipe here.

I kept the stock in the fridge for overnight and was ready to use it next day. The chilled stock has become like pure jiggly gelatine! Mmm...happy collagen. The stock was divided into two small-size donabe and heated.

Once the stock starts simmering, a package of dry ramen (easy way!) was added to each donabe and cooked for a few minutes. Then, 2 teaspoons of donabe-smoked soy sauce was drizzled into each donabe and the heat was turned off. That's it!

Mini-donabe ramen was served individually at a table and it was garnished simply with Korean nori seaweed and some sliced scallion with a small drizzle of la-yu. My focus was to serve it very simple so that we could really appreciate the depth of the broth's flavor.

The broth was unbelievable! The drizzle of soy sauce upgraded the already rich-flavored broth even more. Bravo!

Mini-size donabe are available in the following designs on toiro's website.

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Naoko/ About Me

Author of DONABE cookbook (Ten Speed Press, Oct 2015). I am from Tokyo, and currently live in Los Angeles. I cook with donabe (Japanese clay pot) every day when I'm home and promote happy donabe lifestyle to people around the world. In 2008, I established a company called, toiro kitchen, an online donabe shop and a US representative of Nagatani-en (iga-mono brand), a producer of authentic Iga-yaki donabe and pottery, founded in 1832 in Iga, Japan. Check out toiro kitchen website: toirokitchen.com) Happy donabe life!